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Breaking News in Tech, Search, Social, & BusinessTue, 03 Mar 2015 20:33:43 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.1Google, Apple May Partner On Cloud Computinghttp://www.webpronews.com/google-apple-may-partner-on-cloud-computing-2007-06
http://www.webpronews.com/google-apple-may-partner-on-cloud-computing-2007-06#commentsFri, 08 Jun 2007 17:05:37 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=38310As rumors go, this is a pretty solid one: it seems that Google and Apple will partner, and together, the companies are likely to give .Mac a huge cloud-computing boost.
]]>As rumors go, this is a pretty solid one: it seems that Google and Apple will partner, and together, the companies are likely to give .Mac a huge cloud-computing boost.

Google, Apple May Partner On Cloud Computing

“Cloud computing is the hot new thing in the world of technology right now,” writes Wired’s Fred Vogelstein. “Apple makes beautiful hardware, but it hasn’t improved on .Mac, its cloud based storage offering, in years. You get 1GB of storage on .Mac for $100. That’s laughable in an era where you can get double that for nothing.”

But that’s exactly where Google would come in. “We’re a perfect back end to the problems that they’re trying to solve,” Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, told Vogelstein. “They have very good judgment on user interface and people. But they don’t have this supercomputer (that Google has), which is the data centers. What they have is a manufacturing business that’s doing quite well.”

And if the word of one CEO isn’t good enough for you, Vogelstein has collected a comment from the other one, as well. “In response to a question last week he actually agreed, adding ‘stay tuned,’” writes the Wired author.

So it appears that finding out what Google and Apple are up to is more of a waiting game than anything. People such as Michael Parekh and MG Siegler will be glad to know that an answer could come as soon as Monday, at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2007.

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/google-apple-may-partner-on-cloud-computing-2007-06/feed2Amazon Stretches Into Elastic Computinghttp://www.webpronews.com/amazon-stretches-into-elastic-computing-2006-08
http://www.webpronews.com/amazon-stretches-into-elastic-computing-2006-08#commentsFri, 25 Aug 2006 17:02:22 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=31122Just as the online retailer expanded its web service offerings with its S3 Simple Storage Service, Amazon now offers the Elastic Compute Cloud, a virtual machine for developers to use.

If there is going to be an incrementing of Web 2.0, Amazon.com may be the company clicking the counter that flips it to the next number. Their release of the EC2 limited beta, called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, provides a virtual computing environment and bills only for what capacity is used.

The virtual machine image created by developers can be controlled through web service APIs. As needed, more instances of the image can be commissioned to run simultaneously, numbering hundreds or even thousands. They can be configured to scale up and down in number automatically, based on needs.

Amazon said on its site the EC2 service has been designed to work with S3, which gives developers storage and computing in a combined package. An EC2 instance provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth, according to their documentation.

These instances, dubbed Amazon Machine Images, can be created from scratch from among a number of building block AMIs like web, application, and database servers. Several globally available AMIs that have been preconfigured can be chosen for use to serve a given purpose, without needing to build a custom AMI.

Once created, the developer would upload the instance to the S3 service, and register the AMI. Amazon then assigns it a unique identifier to it. Users can run, monitor, and terminate instances by using the identifier along with the EC2 web service APIs to do so.

Together, S3 and EC2 have a cost structure that could benefit the next cash-poor but idea-rich entrepreneurs who want to build an online service without incurring the massive debt many take on in the form of credit card loans, second mortgages, and other money-raising ideas.

Moreover co-founder David Galbraith blogged that this represented the grid computing idea that has been bandied around by Oracle for some time. He also wryly noted, “If it were Google that had launched this, I imagine there would have been more fuss.”:

I need to investigate more. However, for startups this potentially solves the ‘launch’ problem, where you need extra horsepower for a traffic boost at launch, but the cost of setting it up is prohibitive if you only need that level of service for a couple of weeks.

Who knows? Maybe the next Amazon.com or the next Google will come from Amazon’s web services.